Doran Larson, the Edward North Chair of Greek and Greek Literature and Professor of Literature and Creative Writing, is the co-author of a chapter in The Cambridge Companion to American Prison Writing and Mass Incarceration. Edited by David Coogan of Virginia Commonwealth University, the volume was published in October by Cambridge University Press.
In “State-Raised Convicts: Jack Henry Abbott and Kenneth Hartman,” Larson and co-author Kenneth Hartman, a former inmate, author, and prison reform advocate who spent more than 38 years in a California prison before being released, explore the phenomenon of incarcerated writers who self-identify as “state raised” – that is, those who are “bound to state-sponsored spaces of involuntary confinement (including foster care, juvenile detention, jails, and prisons) from childhood.”
According to the publisher’s description of the chapter, it “presents writers for whom legal confinement has formed the majority of their lived experience and who thus bring uniquely troubled while familiar (verging on the familial) perspectives to the explication of and reflection on legal caging and the writing that emerges from it.”
Larson is the founder of the American Prison Writing Archive (APWA), which grew from a collection of essays from incarcerated individuals and prison workers he received while working on a book project. In 2017 he was awarded a grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to expand and digitize the AWPA collection.
Originally housed at Hamilton, and moved to Johns Hopkins University in 2023, the APWA includes thousands of contributions by current and formerly incarcerated individuals, as well as correctional officers, staff, administrators and volunteers.
Posted November 12, 2025
